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Sociophonetics of the Le Havre Accent

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Sociophonetics of the Le Havre Accent SOCIOPHONETICS OF THE LE HAVRE ACCENT Damien Hall Newcastle University (UK) [email protected] ABSTRACT 24, 28, 33, 35, 36, 43, 47], the dominant perception is that variation in French across Northern France is We report on a pilot analysis of two speakers—M, 33, mostly lexical [4]. and F, 24, both middle-class—from Le Havre, The French spoken in Le Havre is of interest France, part of the larger Towards A New Linguistic because it is subject to two possibly contradictory Atlas of France project.1 The aim is to isolate features influences. On the one hand, France has been to investigate in greater detail in the full analysis. characterised as a ‘hypercephalic’ country [2], where Two vowel changes are analysed: the merger or the capital has nationwide influence out of proportion separation of /a/ (as in patte /pat/ ‘paw’) and /ɑ/ (pâtes to the distance between it and the country’s other /pɑt/ ‘pasta’), and the fronting of /ɔ/. Most areas of large urban centres. Le Havre is relatively close to France merge /a/ and /ɑ/ to /a/ [18, 24, 46], but some Paris (215km/134mi), and the two are connected by Normandy speakers separate them [21], as does the road, rail and river, so we would expect Paris to be a regional language Norman, the oral vowel system of significant influence on it anyway, but the influence which is very close to that of its sister language is still magnified by the organisation of the country. French [30]. Both speakers analysed here have On the other hand, the region of Normandy has a significant word-list differences between /a/ and /ɑ/. well-known autochthonous variety, Norman, a sister The female speaker also has fronted /ɔ/, a well-known variety to French [30]. Norman was once spoken over feature of modern informal French [3], but one which a large area from Dieppe in the East to the Channel has not been found for Norman. The emerging picture Islands in the West, but it now has no monolingual is of an urban accent which combines regional speakers, and relatively few bilingual ones [30]. features and more widespread urban ones, even There are some adult learners of Norman in both among middle-class speakers. mainland France and (especially) the Channel Islands [29]. Despite this apparent moribundity, this paper Keywords: sociophonetics, phonetics, phonology, finds a possible influence from Norman in the French French, Norman of Le Havre. We analyse word-list productions of two pairs of 1. INTRODUCTION vowels, the /a ~ ɑ/ pair and the /ɔ ~ œ/ pair. /a/ and /ɑ/ are phonemes of classical French, and also of modern This paper presents initial results from the ongoing Canadian French, though much of the French of Towards A New Linguistic Atlas of France project France (at least from middle-class speakers) now (TANLAF; [22]). TANLAF aims to investigate merges them to /a/ [11, 21, 45]. Despite this, a possible differences between the varieties of French distinction which is at least allophonic, if not spoken in the major towns and cities of Northern phonemic, has been found in the Regional French of France; we present here results from Le Havre, one of Normandy in sites other than Le Havre [21], and the the largest cities (population approx. 300,000) in the distinction in Norman is also at least allophonic [30]. largely rural region of Normandy. The relationship between /ɔ/ and /œ/ is of a The dominant wisdom in the field is that there are different kind: fronting of /ɔ/ towards [œ] has been not many distinct regional varieties of French within noted since at least the late 1950s [38]. It still seems the North of France (the langue d’oïl area, where the to be productive in much urban French of the North autochthonous varieties are closely related to of France [1], and there is evidence it is now Standard French) [2, 11]. Native speakers themselves spreading to rural areas too [38]. The study in [9] is also find it difficult to tell apart the varieties of French divided into Northern French and Southern French spoken by natives of different cities in the North of samples, and each sample includes both urban and France [7, 8], though the area around the far Northern rural speakers, indicating that they did not expect to city of Lille may be an exception [41, 42]. Overall, find much difference between urban and rural despite recent work showing large numbers of treatments of /ɔ/ fronting. Our analysis therefore speakers throughout France pronouncing certain aimed to see whether it was also present in Le Havre. words in non-normative ways [4], and work showing phonological variation and change in Paris [12, 13, 2645 2. METHOD midpoints, using a modified version of [34]. Reliability was ensured because recommended use of We analyse two of the TANLAF Le Havre EasyAlign requires checking phone boundaries; this informants: a 24-year-old woman (F24) and a 33- also gave the opportunity to check signal quality and year-old man (M33). Following [32], final sample the reliability of Praat’s formant detection. size per city will vary with the size of the city; as Le Raw formant frequencies in Hz were Lobanov- Havre has between 200,000 and 1,000,000 normalised through phonR [39]. The potential inhabitants, its final sample will be two men and two presence of distinctions between all relevant vowel women. Within each city, the sample is stratified only pairs for each speaker was then tested by t-test on the by biological sex. Informants must have spent the normalised F1 (height) and F2 (anteriority) values. majority of their life in the urban area of the city concerned, especially since the age of 4, so that most 3. RESULTS of their peers are from there [31]. All informants are aged 18-33, middle-class, with at most one university Raw Hz formant frequencies, normalised values, and degree, and none are educators. These criteria are in full vowel-plots for F24 and M33 are provided at order to eliminate possible confounding motivations [23]. for variation. In this way, any variation found The partial vowel-plots in Figures 1 and 2 show between cities is more likely to be regional variation, the relationships between /a/ and /ɑ/, and /ɔ/, /œ/ and and not caused by social class differences, age /ə/, for F24 and M33. The figures compare the mean differences or stereotypes which may dictate the kind values of the speakers’ vowels with a reference set of of French that an educated person ‘should’ speak. vowels, mostly from [15], but including /ə/ from [49], Recordings are made in relaxed surroundings as [15] does not include it. (these informants were recorded in their homes). The speakers analysed here were recorded on a Marantz Figure 1: Low and mid vowels of speaker F24 PMD671 solid-state recorder, recording direct to compared with female reference vowels [15]. .wav (sampling rate of 22.05kHz / 16-bit). As storage of large files is now much easier than it was, many studies now record at double this rate, but 22.05kHz is also still used in studies of vowels [e.g. 5, 44], as it provides reliable measurements for frequencies below 11.025kHz [16], which is still far above the frequencies which have been found to be sociolinguistically relevant for vowels, up to about 4kHz [25]. The microphone was a collar-mounted Audio-Technica PRO70 cardioid condenser lavalier. Speakers recorded an interview with the researcher, a reading passage and a word-list. Word- list data is analysed in this pilot study, on the basis that any regional difference appearing there will certainly appear in less formal connected speech. The word-list was presented in PowerPoint, one word per Figure 2: Low and mid vowels of speaker M33 slide, so as not to show speakers when the end of the compared with male reference vowels [15]. list was approaching. Analysis was done in Praat [6]. Table 1 shows the tokens analysed here. Table 1: Tokens analysed in this paper /a/ /ɑ/ /ɔ/ /œ/ /ə/ F24 87 32 62 18 20 M33 120 26 70 25 144 The discrepancy between speaker totals is explained by the removal of outliers and badly- recorded tokens. Recordings were segmented using EasyAlign [20]. Formant values were measured at vowel 2646 We use a relatively old reference set because more Table 3: Differences between /ɔ/ and /œ/ modern reference sets ([19, 49]) do not include /ɑ/: most speakers of French in France, particularly young Height Anteriority df and middle-aged ones, do not now make an audible t p t p difference between /a/ and /ɑ/ [11, 17]. F24 79 3.345 <0.01 9.999 <0.001 M33 94 4.227 <0.001 11.705 <0.001 3.1. /a/ and /ɑ/ Table 4: Differences between /ɔ/ and /ə/ Tokens were coded as /ɑ/ if their phonological Height Anteriority environment was listed in [14] as being likely to df produce /ɑ/ and not /a/. A list of phonological t p t p environments for Quebec French was used in this F24 81 1.908 >0.05 2.369 <0.05 study of the French of France because Quebec French M33 213 6.087 <0.001 8.573 <0.001 still reliably distinguishes /ɑ/ from /a/ in the way that the French of France once did, though the distinction /ɔ/ and /œ/ should of course be significantly is now rare in the French of France. Token numbers different for any speaker, but the test was carried out for /ɑ/ are much lower than numbers for /a/ simply as a sense-check, and gave the expected result (Table because of the low frequency of /ɑ/ relative to /a/ in 3).
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